Frank Gehry for the Rest of Us

The village of Greenport sits at the northern tip of the North Fork of Long Island, a good three-hour drive from Manhattan. Once a bustling whaling port, Greenport today is considerably quieter, with a part-time mayor and none of the social cachet of the Hamptons. As the locals say, on the South Fork they call it sushi, on the North Fork we call it bait.

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It's not the sort of place you'd expect to find a notable project by one of New York's most promising young architecture firms, Sharples Holden Pasquarelli. As part of its $13 million redevelopment of the town's waterfront, SHoP, as the firm is known, is building a camera obscura. Latin for "dark room," the centuries-old invention is essentially a viewing chamber that gives people inside a 360-degree panorama of what's happening outside.

But it's not what the structure does or even how it looks that's important. It's the way the camera is being built. The camera obscura is the first building to be 100 percent digitally designed and computer fabricated, SHoP's partners say. Every piece of wood, steel, and aluminum – 750 in total – is custom-made and completely unique. When the parts arrive bubble-wrapped at the site, the construction crew has only to fit them together. Weather permitting, the final bolt will be screwed in by New Year's. The firm has used this approach on parts of its other projects but never for an entire structure. That makes the $185,000 camera a modest but important showcase for the firm's ambitious process, which begins with 3-D modeling software and ends with construction workers assembling the laser-cut pieces into their finished form.

If SHoP's computer-driven architecture sounds familiar, you're probably thinking of Frank Gehry, who pioneered the use of digital fabrication in the 1990s. The sculpted titanium facade of his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao – followed by the billowed steel sails of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the incongruously curved brick walls of the Ray and Maria Stata Center at MIT – could not have been built in any other way.

As part of the first generation of architects to go digital, Gehry used new technologies to make possible buildings so complex they previously existed only in the imagination. He is fundamentally interested in form, and his swooping shapes often force contractors to develop innovative construction techniques. That's partly why Gehry's work is so exciting – and so pricey. "Using today's tools, you could basically model any shape, press a button, print out the construction templates and say, 'Build this,'" says Craig Schwitter, of Buro Happold, an engineering firm that has collaborated with SHoP and Gehry. "That's the model of working that makes things expensive."

SHoP adopts some of Gehry's techniques, but to a different end: lowering costs. The firm views digital tools as a way to streamline the design and engineering process, minimizing labor hours and materials waste in order to make high-end, customized architecture more affordable. "Gehry is shape-driven," says SHoP partner Gregg Pasquarelli. "We're more process driven. We would never build an elaborate framework to support a curve. We'd let the curve be determined by information from our materials suppliers or by the parameters of the fabrication techniques." SHoP can seamlessly integrate such factors into its designs because, from the outset, it uses many of the same 3-D software tools as its engineers and fabricators. The shape of the zinc panels in one project were based on the standard size of the raw material, so as to reduce unusable scraps. The serpentine walls in another took into account the degree of curvature that could be easily fabricated.

"Rather than using the computer to generate form, SHoP uses the computer to reconsider the entire process of building," says Reed Kroloff, dean of the Tulane School of Architecture and former editor of Architecture magazine.

Gehry starts his design process with wooden blocks and sketches. Next, his model makers translate the designs into cardboard prototypes. Eventually these are imported into Catia, the high-end 3-D software Gehry borrowed from the aerospace industry more than a decade ago – and which licenses for up to $15,000 a seat, plus training costs. The end results are amazing but like haute couture, available only to the deepest of pockets: The Stata Center came to $400 per square foot, $650 when you include design costs. The industry average for design and construction of a new science facility is $260 a square foot.

When it comes to actual construction, SHoP reduces hard-hat hours by replacing onsite measuring and sawing with computer-controlled fabrication. And time is money – labor costs can eat up to 80 percent of a budget. The camera obscura's wooden formwork was milled in a single morning in Brooklyn; the steel was sliced by a plasma laser over two days in Commack, Long Island, and partially assembled upstate. Once the pieces arrive in Greenport, they'll be fitted together in about six weeks.

SHoP also saves money by keeping in house some jobs typically handled by specialists or consultants. For the Porter House, a condominium tower in Manhattan's Meatpacking district, the architects built a six-floor addition clad in zinc panels and light boxes atop a 1905 brick warehouse. Most architects would have hired an expert like the Permasteelisa Group, the go-to company for Gehry, I. M. Pei, and Norman Foster, to build the facade. Instead, SHoP worked directly with the engineers, fabricators, and general contractor to design and install the wall for an estimated 20 percent less than a specialist would have charged. In the end, the Porter House was constructed for 10 percent less than the average $225 per square foot of prime New York residential real estate.

For clients, the advantages are obvious.

"It means you don't have to be the Disney Concert Hall to be able to afford great architecture," says Buro Happold's Schwitter.

In taking on the details usually left to others, SHoP has broken one of its profession's big taboos. Architects usually avoid the specifics of construction in order to sidestep liability for faulty results. In contrast, SHoP has taken an equity stake in four projects – and the legal accountability that comes with it. "If we want to push the profession to try new methods," explains Pasquarelli, "we have to be willing to take responsibility for the risk of what we were proposing."

From the beginning, SHoP aimed to be a different kind of architecture firm. Founded in 1996 by five recent grads of Columbia's School of Architecture, SHoP gained visibility quickly. Its Rector Street Pedestrian Bridge was the first construction at Ground Zero after September 11. This year, SHoP completed a first-class lounge for Virgin Atlantic at JFK Airport. And in May, the firm was chosen, along with British architect Richard Rogers, to create the master plan for a $500 million redevelopment of Manhattan's East River waterfront, a 2-mile swath between Battery Park and the Lower East Side. It was SHoP's work in Greenport that convinced Vishaan Chakrabarti, director of the Manhattan office of the city planning department, that the firm could balance a complex project with a public-works budget.

"SHoP gets into the nitty-gritty of construction," says Chakrabarti. "They understand it and figure out ways to build beautiful structures that aren't exorbitant."

Last January, SHoP moved from a 37th Street office, so far east it might as well have been in the Queens Midtown Tunnel, to a penthouse suite on Park Place. The space is already crowded with staff, which at 30 heads has doubled in the past two years. From the roof of the new office, the young partners look out on a century of architecture. They see the Brooklyn Bridge and City Hall. The Woolworth Building, once the tallest in the world, stands across the street. A few blocks west lies Ground Zero, where a new icon of the New York skyline will someday rise. To the east, Gehry and Santiago Calatrava have residential towers on the drawing board. And SHoP's own vision of cheaper, smarter, better architecture will shape the waterfront to the south.

"Before that can happen, we have to break down the conventions of the profession," admits Pasquarelli. And rebuild it, piece by laser-cut piece.

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